


it's the best years of your life they want to steal

by Sarah T (SarahT)



Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-27 23:43:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/301365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SarahT/pseuds/Sarah%20T
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A day of mourning for the Circus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's the best years of your life they want to steal

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bogged](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bogged/gifts).



The day of Jim Prideaux's funeral was like a ghastly half-holiday at the Circus, with all the top floor gone. Only Bill Haydon had stayed behind to man the battlements, and he was (unusually, for Bill) nowhere to be seen. The staff, left to their own devices, fell to glum contemplation or an uneasy relaxation, depending on how well they'd known the dead man.

Peter Guillam hadn't had much to do with Prideaux, but his death had still been jarring. They lost people—his section lost people—all the time, but they were petty pavement artists, babysitters pulled out of the gutter, the kind of people life would've picked off anyway in the natural course. You gave a damn, but you weren't exactly surprised. For Jim Prideaux to die was like seeing one of your schoolmasters keel over in the midst of chapel.

He stood in the doorway of his office, smoking and gazing into the building's interior. The airshaft was meant to provide some sense of space and light in the windowless building, but it didn't succeed. He wondered who had chosen that design in the first place. When they were building it, after the war: a façade inside a façade, and in the center a great hollow space.

He heard footsteps from below, and voices. Seniors back in, then. He supposed he might as well get some lunch. He stepped back into his office to collect his coat, but when he turned back to the door, an arm barred his way.

"Young Peter Guillam," Bill Haydon said, "let's get out of this bloody place."

 

The pub just down the road was absolutely, no-question off-limits to Circus personnel, so, of course, Bill strode in as if he owned it. Peter followed in his wake, automatically checking the room for plants, and took up a seat next to him at the bar. It was a strange choice of venue, considering all the things they must under no circumstances discuss in a place like this.

But, Peter worked out a second later, of course, that was why Bill had chosen it. Oh, Lord, Peter thought, he's going to confide in me. Not that he hadn't been confidante to a lot worse than Bill Haydon, in his line of work, but the thought was still alarming. It was, after all, probably for the best that he didn't know Bill's secrets.

"To Jim," Peter offered, when their drinks arrived, hoping to delay the inevitable.

Bill's hand stopped halfway to his mouth. "Yes," he said, with a bit too much heartiness. "To Jim."

They clinked glasses. Bill glanced down at his, hesitated, then downed the whiskey in one go. He made a face. "Let us speak of cheerier subjects. Ever had trouble with the ladies, Peter?"

"My share," Peter said cautiously, sipping at his own.

"There's one hanging round my flat right now. Can't go home. She thinks I've got something on the side, which is, for once, not true. Not that I can persuade her of that."

Bill knocked back another drink. Out in the natural light, he looked much paler. There was a faint sweep of stubble across his jaw. His eyes glittered moistly.

He hasn't slept in at least two days, Peter thought. But he still looks better than Control did, leaving that morning with eyes sunk staring into his skull.

"Does she know about Jim?" he ventured.

Bill swung on him such a sudden focus that Peter wondered how he'd managed to put a foot wrong—if Bill actually thought Peter was daft enough to have meant Hungary. He must've realized how ridiculous that was, though, because he relaxed back onto the stool.

"No. Those sorts of things don't interest her. Usually, one of her better qualities."

"Right." And what story could Bill tell, anyway, to make her understand?

"Not the last few days, however." Bill looked up at the chalkboard above the bar. "Let's see what sort of rot they serve here."

 

Despite the whiskeys, the only sign of Bill's intoxication as they left the pub half an hour later was a certain excessive momentum in his stride. They walked up a narrow side street to where Bill's car was parked. Peter saw his eyes flick to the back seat before he put the key in the lock. He wondered what Bill would do if there were an assassin hiding there. He didn't exactly look as if he'd kept up his hand-to-hand combat skills. But, then, suddenly, Peter wasn't sure: there was something vicious in Bill, he realized, the kind of thing that could carry the day in scuffles on the street more often than the instructors liked to admit. For all his charm, Bill would bite and gouge and bleed until he was smashed into stillness.

Bill looked back up, and caught him watching, but only smiled—making a ghastly effect on his pale face—and shrugged. "Habit," he said, and opened the door.

"Where are we going?" Peter asked after a few minutes of apparently aimless driving.

"Well, there are the usual places," Bill said, "but they're all so dreary. I'm sick of dreariness, Peter."

His left hand dropped to Peter's thigh.

Peter's head snapped back, ever so slightly, before he could control the movement. This certainly was the strangest time he had ever lived through. Jim Prideaux was dead, Control had failed miserably, and now Bill Haydon, technically his superior in the service, was running his hand slowly up his leg.

He wasn't surprised, exactly. It had been some time since he'd been surprised by anything like this. But the sudden shift in reality was always disorienting: in half a heartbeat, in the space of a single movement of a hand, the impossible had become the actual. Had turned out to have been the actual all along. Peter wasn't sure he cared for the feeling, there in the little car with Bill, but he couldn't undo the last minute.

He swallowed, tried to bring steadiness to his voice. He wanted Bill to know this wouldn't be the first time. "Dreariness is right out, then."

Bill glanced at him then, and the curl of his mouth was barely approving. "I'm glad you agree."

Peter fumbled his cigarettes from his jacket and lit one, pretending to consider. For a man who knew the locations of a dozen safehouses and clandestine meeting points in London, he always had difficulty with location. He'd never wanted the Circus mixed up in this part of his life. But now it was as mixed up in it as it was possible to be.

"Oh, God, none of _those_ , either," Bill said, reaching out to take the cigarette from his fingers, and Peter surrendered: he would never be worldly in Bill's eyes.

What a life, where he passed for an innocent. "Well, then?"

Bill drew on the cigarette. Peter watched him. He must have been overbearingly handsome once. Even now, half-gone-to-seed, the symmetry of his features was something to admire. In profile, he looked like someone who should hold a position of power.

"Did you know, Peter, that I paint?"

 

Somewhat to Peter's surprise, Bill actually did have a studio, high-ceilinged and flooded with the greyish London light. It was less cluttered than Peter might have predicted, but several half-finished abstract paintings were stacked haphazardly against one of the walls. He didn't know anything about art, but nothing in them made him want to get a closer look.

Along another of the walls was a double bed.

"Paint 'from life' a lot, do you?" Peter ventured dryly.

"I'm not one to waste an opportunity," Bill said, hands in pockets, just looking at him. Peter raised his chin, abruptly uncomfortable. He could imagine the parade of boys—and girls—in and out of the place, and he wasn't sure this was any less tawdry than one of the clubs would have been.

He could walk out. He doubted it would change anything.

But his blood was up; they were in play. So, instead, he took off his jacket and hung it on the nearest chair. He looked down to unbutton one of his cuffs and instinct warned him; he glanced up just in time to meet Bill's mouth as he pressed him backwards, pinning both hands against the wall.

The impulse to push back, reverse their positions, slid at once into his muscles, but he stilled himself. This was Bill Haydon. Pointless to pretend he was going to gain control of the situation. Instead, he relaxed and tilted his head back.

Bill let his wrists go to slide his hands greedily over Peter's torso, sending a surge of electricity downwards in him. Bill was solid where he was slender, his weight sufficient to hold him still. There was surprisingly little alcohol on his breath as his mouth roved down to Peter's jaw, then his neck, then his shoulder.

"Fuck, you're beautiful," he breathed in a way Peter didn't think was meant for him. "Why did I have to wait so long?"

"Have to?" Peter asked, picking up on the suspicious phrase out of habit so engrained it apparently operated even when he was about to get shagged, and immediately regretted it. Bill had paused, lifting his lips from Peter's skin. He thought impatiently, I don't really care, do I? and reached up to press his hand into Bill's hair.

"Never you mind, young Peter," he said finally. His hand glided over Peter's cock through his trousers, and then Peter really didn't care.

When they tumbled onto the bed, naked, Peter quickly ended up braced on hands and knees. Bill murmured, "Magnificent," in a tone dripping with irony, before pushing into him. Peter felt a stirring of resentment, but Bill curled his hand around him and he lost the train of thought.

His orgasm was quick, blotting out his surroundings for a moment. When he came out of the white, he found himself looking ahead at the wrought-iron bars of the bed as Bill continued to move behind him. He thought about Bill, reportedly the best field man in his day—not the most intelligent, perhaps, that was surely Smiley—but the best. Even now, relegated to a desk, he stood out: he still carried himself as if he were the most charming, the cleverest man in the room. Control himself tolerated it, though with the occasional gibe. None of Peter's generation had that air, the easy glide over the assumption that they were in control over whatever happened to be the situation. He'd envied that in Bill since he'd known him.

And yet, there they were, in the same place, chasing the same sad and furtive pleasures. It all ended up here, in some clandestine bed with a partner who could never be acknowledged. As Bill panted and shuddered to his own climax deep inside Peter, he wondered if this weren't some perverse passing of the torch, if he weren't marked to be the Bill of the future.

God, he thought as they collapsed side by side, he hoped not.

"I want you to promise me something, Peter," Bill said some indeterminate time later, rousing out of the half-stupor in which he'd lain, toying with Peter's hair.

"What?" He couldn't possibly think he needed to ask for discretion, not from a homosexual spy who'd just gone to bed with his superior.

"Don't get involved with anyone in the Circus. We're a miserable lot." His quick smile was forced, patently insincere, and the only question was what he meant by the insincerity.

"You're the first," Peter said.

"Then let me be the last. Your alpha and omega."

Bill's laughter at his own pretensions was just as quick and unconvincing. Peter shut his eyes, wondering what was really going on here. "Don't worry."

Bill's fingers tightened in his hair, painfully, then he let go entirely and rolled over.

Peter decided he'd probably never know.


End file.
